Recruitment is increasingly relying on technology. With the rapid evolution of the recruitment market, it’s imperative for your company to embrace new technologies, hiring strategies, and distribution models lest you fall far behind the competition and miss out on the best available talent.
In this piece, we’ll look at the key changes that drive the recruitment market, address questions like what your company can do to adapt to the ever-changing hiring landscape, and how adapting will pay off in the future.
What exactly is changing in the tech hiring landscape?
With the ever-growing online presence of the competent population, it makes perfect sense that most of the sourcing strategies have moved online.
Another development that has certainly affected the behavioral changes of candidates is the ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices and reasonably-stable 3G. This ‘ontogeny’ is especially applicable to the Generation Z, who, according to recent research, spends approximately 16 hours a day on their mobile phones, most of which is spent on social media browsing. The year 2019 is the first year to see Gen Z fully entering into the hiring market, hence it’s critical to understand and adapt to the peculiarities and demands of that emerging workforce.
According to the Citrix Systems CEO Kirill Tatarinov’s bold predictions, 50% of the workforce would be remote, and the number of the 100% remote companies in the US had already been steadily growing for years. Moreover, remote employment opens up perennial talent pools on a global scale. Having said that, it’s worth noting that even if companies are not yet ready to switch to a full-fledged remote work model, they will certainly benefit from incorporating flexibility in their employees’ schedules.
It’s a shame not to take advantage of the ever-growing prolificacy of recruitment technologies and toolsto automate some of the administrative processes and menial labor tasks and, instead — spend more time with the talent. A couple of those tools include Applicant Tracking Software, like Bullhorn and Workable, Video Interview Software, like RecRight, and other all-purpose recruitment software, like BambooHR and ZohoRecruit. We’ll cover some of those later in detail in another section. Several of the other groundbreaking technologies, worth mentioning, include Artificial Intelligence and Robot Recruiters, which are specifically helpful for automating routine screening and scoring procedures.
How and what to adapt?
Hereinbelow, we’ll look at some of the strategies you can adopt to keep up with the pace of a changing hiring landscape or even try and stay ahead of the market.
Employer branding
According to employer branding statistics, most of the job seekers check an employer online before accepting a job offer. Building up an online presence with well-managed social communities around your brand is, hence, extremely important for increasing people’s awareness and trustworthiness of your company.
These are a few tips to help you get started:
- Research your competitor’s social media strategy and incorporate their best practices;
- Improve your presence on employer review sites, keep an eye on any negative reviews and address those in a timely fashion. Ask some of your happy employees to leave positive but honest feedback on the sites.
- Make your website attractive to candidates by employing basic web usability and accessibility strategies, so everyone has an equal chance of understanding your site and applying easily;
- Build social media communities with frequent updates about your company and employees;
- Engage with the community by answering their concerns and questions on social media;
- Think of any cool employee perks you can offer to your prospective candidates to hook them up on the vacancy like free meals and snacks in the office;
- Improve your job descriptions, making them more attractive to the talent;
- Allow for some flexibility in the employee’s schedules to attract a more diverse population like working moms, for example;
- Improve employee engagement. According to research conducted by Korn Ferry, the number one reason people change jobs is boredom. Do not let that happen: happy employees will eventually bring more happy employees which, in turn, will improve your employer branding.
Having said all of the above, investing in employer branding effectively and timely puts you ahead of the competition and guarantees successful hiring results in the future. By taking care of improving your company’s reviews on review sites, incorporating social media recruiting, and building up transparent open-minded culture, you’ll increase your chances of attracting the best candidates.
Sourcing for tech recruiters
The primary sourcing channels in the era of ‘Digital Darwinism’ are targeted advertising and social media recruitment. Let’s elaborate on them further and see how you can improve them.
Targeted advertising and PPC
You can advertise your business both to prospective clients and candidates alike by taking advantage of the Pay-Per-Click advertising on the search engines. This way you’ll target a particular demographic with certain search histories and interests and improve your brand awareness at the same time.
Same works with Facebook and other social media targeting and retargeting ads, which have become very sophisticated tools that enable you to narrow down your target audience to even those few who live next to your company’s building.
You can also take advantage of that same principle but with other proprietary technologies on various job sites like monster.com, for example. Speaking of which, these behavioral targeted networks employ cookie-based targeting that looks at the person’s interests and search history to determine relevance or interest in a particular career. Basically, instead of showing your “looking for a developer” ad to millions of people with different kinds of backgrounds, your ad is shown only to those who are interested in pursuing a career in web development.
Social media recruitment
Social media recruitment doesn’t only boil down to Linkedin, but also Twitter, StackOverflow, Medium, Dev.to, other web development blogs like freecodecamp, etc.
Speaking of Linkedin, which has been on the recruitment scene for quite a while already, it’s still worth mentioning a few tips to increase the effectiveness of your sourcing campaign on that resource:
- Develop a complete keyword-rich profile for both you, as a recruiter, and your company to make it more attractive and credible to potential candidates;
- Create your company’s showcase page, where you can feature a particular brand or product or even showcase some of your best and loyal employees with their stories and impressions of working for you;
- Join all possible professional groups and engage in meaningful conversations with other members.
For Facebook, most of those same principles work, including showcasing your company’s work on the company’s page, engaging within the development communities, and posting your job offers in some of the relevant groups.
Since Twitter is, currently, yet not indisputably, a preferred communication medium among web developers and designers, it would be unreasonable not to take advantage of the sourcing on the platform. If you’re a recruiter, we’d advise you follow all so-called “web development” celebrities, who usually garner tons of followers, whom you can parse later and find out suitable candidates.
You can also take advantage of the Twitter search by using search operators; for example, if you know about a tech conference that had recently happened and you want to see developers who attended the event, you can try the following string, JSNation near:”Amsterdam” within:10mi since:2019-06-04 until:2019-06-08, which will return all users who were in Amsterdam during Jun 4 till June 8 and tweeted about the conference.
Apart from that, it makes perfect sense to have an established company’s presence on Twitter, with a few people advocating about your company, sharing some of their personal career stories and advice, helping other people use your product and services, etc. This way, candidates will come to you.
Sourcing on StackOverflow has never been easier, the site owners made it all transparent and clear: you can quickly find questions related to your product, if you’re a software company, and share internal knowledge, address user’s concerns or even perform usability tests on earlier versions of your products; you can post vacancies; source for candidates manually; or purchase access to StackOverflow’s Developer Hiring Platform.
The same pretty much applies to other platforms like dev.to, where you can pay for posting a vacancy or manually search for developers who continuously post valuable content and seem genuinely interested in sharing their knowledge.
You can also source for candidates or advertise or become a sponsor of tech conference s, which are invaluable sources for networking, building connections, learning from others, and ultimately, attracting relevant talent.
Automation
Automating most of the administrative stuff can help your recruiters save time on menial labor and spend more of it on tasks that truly matter to your company: improving employer branding, sourcing candidates, engaging with the community, and attracting the best available talent.
While the tools we’ve discussed earlier, like recruitment software, make perfect sense and can be easily accepted by most of the HR practitioners, other technology like Artificial Intelligence raises lots of questions and even evoke a sense of dread. However, AI is nothing to be afraid of, moreover, you might be already using it without fully understanding that AI has actually made its way into your daily work. Applicant Tracking Software, for example, is an example of AI, where software screens, scores, and rates applicants’ resumes and comes up with recommendations with the best candidates streamlined to the top of the pool.
Other interesting technologies that can make recruiters’ jobs easier are online testing and assessment tools like HackerRank and Pymetrics. The latter is especially useful if you happen to hire web developers, since HackerRank features lots of pre-defined coding challenges for both juniors and senior developers, as well as provides automated code reviews, scalable metrics, etc.
Education
To stay ahead of the market, it’s important to educate your staff about the latest technological advances including breakthrough or innovative software, new recruitment strategies, hiring markets, the general state of the economy and employment market, and so on. A few ways to do so are to attend HR Tech Conferences and organize workshops or training sessions for your HR department.
How will adapting pay off in the future?
Adaptation to the changing environment has always been a crucial part of the survival of the species. That’s why the importance of the adaption is pretty obvious: if you want to survive and prosper as a company, you’ll need to adapt now, otherwise, there will be more agile companies who will take your place and thrive instead of you. Adaption should always be slow and incremental so that the surviving organism of your enterprise has enough time to get accustomed to the changes and implement them without hurting or stalling the natural working process.
Here’s what you can gain by adapting now:
- Increasing your brand awareness;
- Improving your employer brand;
- Receiving more applications from qualified potential candidates;
- Enlarging the talent pool of qualified talent;
- Getting to hire top talent instead of mediocre;
- Saving time and money on administrative issues and spending more time with your employees and candidates;
- Improving employee engagement;
- Boosting your company’s productivity;
- Ensuring the prosperity of your company in the future.
Having said all of the above, it’s better you start implementing incremental changes now, rather than wait until later when you have more money and resources to do so. Start slowly and do the best you can with the available resources you have now, and then accelerate the adaptation process once you have more resources.
